Chapter 49 2025
The murder of the reverend goes back further than five months.
Meryl Fairbanks, Elwood, Heddy, the reverend, the librarian, the major—over the past two weeks, the sheriff has uncovered a tangled web of relationships, and he’s certain each and every person involved is covering something up and has lied to him.
Which is why he’s decided to return to the beginning.
“Tell me about your son as a boy,” he says.
He is in the cramped living room of the home the reverend grew up in, a small clapboard house at the edge of the school grounds. The older Mrs. Reicher sits across from him, her hands folded primly on her lap and the familiar pinched expression on her face.
She starts with her late husband’s death. The sheriff finds it telling where a person chooses to begin a story. In the reverend’s mother’s world, her husband’s suicide was the defining event of everything that came after.
“I know it’s difficult, but can you tell me what led to his death?”
She says angrily, “We were swindled and cheated. That’s what led to it.”
She goes on to tell him about what sounds like a financial scam in which her husband invested not only his own money but the money of some of his parishioners in a get-rich-quick scheme that didn’t work out.
“My husband couldn’t live with it,” she says. “He was a good man brought down by his trust in the wrong person, and it was too heavy a burden to bear.”
“A single person?”
She doesn’t answer, and he thinks she might not have heard him.
He asks again, louder, “He trusted a single person?”
Still not seeming to hear, she shakes her head and mutters, “And they go on to live rich and get famous, while we . . . well, we . . . we end up living off charity and begging for scraps.”
Her use of the present tense piques his interest.
“Mrs. Reicher,” he says loudly. “Who? Who went on to live rich and get famous?”
“The skater. That damn, blasted skater.”